At the close of its 6th season, THE VAMPIRE DIARIES finds itself at a crossroads.  The ratings are way down, and for the first time since it premiered, the series isn’t one of CW’s biggest hits, but just a mid-range performer.  Viewers didn’t seem to respond to the witch-centric narrative of the season, or […]

YOUNG ADULT: Worth A Ticket – Theron + Oswalt = The Real Thing   Charlize Theron plays the hell out of her character Mavis Gary in the new YOUNG ADULT.  Theron has had a curious Hollywood career, with the usual big-budget flops (remember Aeon Flux?) mixed with a clearly wholehearted commitment to difficult, independent projects […]

  IN THE EARTH (Neon):  After his foray into more commercial cinema with the Netflix remake of Rebecca that didn’t go very well, Ben Wheatley has returned to the stranger and more experimental style of his earlier films like Kill List and High Rise with In the Earth.  It’s not an easy movie to describe […]

> WANDERLUST:  Watch It At Home – Hippy Jokes Thawed Out From 1966 The new WANDERLUST demonstrates the strengths and limitations of amiability in movies.  Its stars, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, have made very profitable careers out of being professionally likable.  Unlike, say, Tom Hanks, who also began his career in light comedy but […]

  THE AFFAIR:  Sunday 10PM on Showtime THE AFFAIR was one of last year’s most confounding shows.  It was at once carefully observed and gimmicky, precise and willfully vague, compulsively watchable and annoying. The problem wasn’t so much the show’s format of telling its overlapping events repeatedly, from the often conflicting perspectives of adulterous Noah […]

  Was this the season that Cinemax’s comparatively low-rent BANSHEE surpassed Justified?  In the subgenre of cop show pulp, the FX series has been the unquestioned class entry, with its distinguished Elmore Leonard auspices and elegantly violent plotting and dialogue.  But with a few episodes to go this season, Justified has felt a bit desultory, […]

  It took some down-to-the-wire negotiations between ABC and production studio Lionsgate, but NASHVILLE made its way to a Season 3 renewal this week.  (And barring further ratings collapse, that makes a Season 4 more likely than not, since ABC would share in the increased revenues from syndication that would follow a 4-season run.)  It […]

> Watch It At Home: Fodder For the Undemanding Young One of the running gags in MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS is that the birds are fascinated by old Charlie Chaplin movies, and can be kept calm for hours just by placing them in front of a TV displaying the silent films.  Mr. Popper’s own ambition is […]